I don’t think Ham’s publishers are going to give me a $3,000 college scholarship for that response, though. They’re looking for a much more substantial defense of a debate that never should have happened in the first place:

For more than a month now, there’s been controversy at South Portland High School in Maine over how they announce the Pledge of Allegiance. Three student body leaders, while reading the morning announcements, were reminding their classmates that they didn’t have to participate by asking students to recite the Pledge “if you’d like to”:

At the time, the principal put a stop to it because, he said, it was going against protocol, but the students (with the principal’s support) went to the school board to request a revision to the policy.

We know that Creationist Ken Ham‘s Answers in Genesis is currently suing the state of Kentucky because he wrongly thinks his for-profit company can limit its hiring to Christians only. Earlier this year, he even posted a video that featured a lawyer defending his right to discriminate:

That lawyer is Mike Johnson, who also happens to serve in the Louisiana House of Representatives.

And that same Mike Johnson is working on a bill that, similar to its predecessors in Indiana and Arkansas, would allow people to deny service to LGBT individuals on the basis of “religious freedom”:

While “religion” was already on that list, as you might expect, it wasn’t obvious to everyone whether that category included atheists, so the law now explicitly says so. (***Edit***: The final wording of the law uses the word “nonreligion,” not “atheist” as I suggested earlier. Same result, though. My apologies for referring to an older version of the bill.)